My sisters and I have hands like our great grandmother. I know this, not because I remember her so well, but because I can see her work-worn hands resting quietly in her lap in a photograph that was taken in 1936. It must have been a Sunday, according to my mother, because they never worked on Sundays, and because she was wearing shoes. Her name was Aksana Shmigelsky and she was married to Nykola Strumbicky, who loved her with all of his heart.
Aksana is sitting in a kitchen chair outside her house at their farm near Vita, Manitoba. Nykola, is standing next to her. They were Baba and Gedo to their many grandchildren and great grandchildren. But to my mother, Mary and her cousins, Aksana was affectionately known as “Fat Baba”, to distinguish her from the other babas: Aksana’s mother and mother-in-law, both of whom were thin.
Kind and hard working, Aksana was barefoot all summer long, unless she was in church. She was known for making bread, cranberry jam, and whiskey, which she only served on special occasions or to important company. The bread was made in an outdoor oven called a pich.
I look at the photos and I think of the work that passed through Aksana’s hands in the harsh winters and blistering hot summers of Manitoba. In the picture with Nykola, she is the same age as I am now.
Some of the work she would have done is familiar to my brothers and sisters and me. Our hands have comforted children, planted marigolds in May, and have even kneaded dough for bread. But her hands were talented in ways that ours are not. Baba’s hands could pluck a chicken, plait garlic pulled fresh from the earth, and make intricate cross stitch patterns in a white cloth for an Easter basket.
My mother was 5 years old in 1936.
She was raised on this farm with her older sister Elsie. Everyone spoke Ukrainian. Mom learned English only when she moved to Winnipeg. The first home she lived in had a thatched roof and a mud floor.
Her grandparents had lived in the traditional Ukrainian style of shelter for more than 30 years before they built their “modern” house when my mother was a little girl. She remembers the new wooden house being built.
She also remembers how wonderful summers were at Vita because her cousins, Bob and Lug Harcott, who were close to her age, would come from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, with their mother, Ann Harcott, to spend the summer at the farm with her.
Canada was deep into the depression in the 1930s, and there were no luxuries on the farm, but there were plenty of good times and they never went hungry.
Some years later, the little brothers would come along to join the gang, Bill Harcott and Bill Bachynsky.
Their mothers, Tillie Bachynsky and Ann Harcott, seen here in 1928, dressed for the camera, remained very close all of their lives.
Aksana and Nykola married in Vita. They had both come to Canada with their families. In the “old country” they were from villages a few miles apart, Zalischiky and Blyschanka in Galicia, Austria, now in the westernmost part of Ukraine.
Nikola came to Canada before Aksana did. He was the eldest of five children and a young adult when his father Petr Strumbicky, then 60, heeded the call of the Canadian Government, offering free land to immigrants with hopes of putting a large “producing population” on the prairie lands of Western Canada. The government was anxious to establish a grain industry, and more importantly, to populate the prairies to prevent the Americans from annexing the region. Free land was offered to the immigrants. For a ten dollar registration fee, each family was granted 160 acres of land.
Petr Strumbicky, together with his wife, Irena Goyman, and their children came to Manitoba with the first group of 27 Ukrainian pioneer families that settled at the Stuartburn Colony, an area more familiarly known as Vita, today. The group sailed on the SS Sicilia, which docked in Quebec City in late July. They traveled by train to Winnipeg and spent a week at the immigration shed on the east side of the CPR station. By the time the exhausted colonists trekked out to their homesteads they had been traveling for two months. It was August and too late to plant a crop. These resilient people put their faith in God and each other. They carved homes out of the earth, and hunkered down to get through the winter with little more than their fierce determination to make it in the new country.
The land they settled had to first be cleared of stones and bush before they could plant crops.
All of the children worked alongside their parents, pulling rocks from the soil.
They suffered many hardships, but they stuck it out. Success was measured by mere survival, and in the small joys of laughing children, hearty meals, and time to visit to sing and tell stories with family and friends.
To this day, Mary, Bob and Lug share stories of their shared childhood. They consider themselves to have been blessed with memories of kindness, generosity and the strength of their grandparents.
In 1993, my parents celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary. I interviewed my mom and her cousins about those summer days long ago, for a family history film, called Korinchikeh. In this segment we get a glimpse of their special times together at Vita.
My mother, Mary (Bachynsky) Krawchenko, turned 80 on April 2. In honour of her birthday, I posted an excerpt from my novel, Ravenscraig. It is a chapter called “Stalwart Peasants in Sheepskin Coats” and is inspired by the story of Aksana and Nykola and their start in Canada.
When the Canadian Pacific Railway opened the Royal Alexandra Hotel on July 19, 1906, it was one of the finest in Canada. It cost a million dollars to build and was designed with the sophisticated business traveler and lavish Winnipeg party host in mind. With 450 rooms, including many luxury suites, it was a dramatic testament to Winnipeg’s self-procaimed reputation as the fastest growing city in the Dominion. In a story about the opening, The Winnipeg Tribune called the impressive hotel a: “guarantee in brick and stone that the future growth of Winnipeg is assured.”
The Royal Alexandra offered exquisite menus and the finest services available for travelers and local residents in need of pampering. If advertising is to be believed, it even provided one of Winnipeg’s early locations for top level beauty treatments.
The terrible announcement was made on March 1, 1971. The building had to come down. There was nothing that could happen to stop it. A local wrecking company, owned by Alexander Billinkoff, was hired to bring down the decayed and decrepit Royal Alex. Because it was Winnipeg, there was still a lot to argue about despite the decision. The history fans were appeased with the promise of an auction and many Manitobans were able to cart away special treasures to hold dear and perhaps even pass down to their grandchildren. But not everyone took things to keep in private collections.
I happened across this short film by Arthur Burrows and Jean Palardy filmed in 1947. I am sharing it for anyone who loves Montreal, and social history. Filmed by the National Film Board, two years after the end of WWII it shows a sparkling view that could only have been created for mass audiences. It isn’t quite fiction, but it is far from documentary in approach. It would have served well as a travel film, encouraging visitors to enjoy the excitement of this cosmopolitan centre. 
celebrity arriving in movie star style to the applause of his adoring public.
Titanic: The Artifacts Exhibition opened in Winnipeg amid much excitement from Titanic enthusiasts. To gaze upon a plate, imagine walking up the grand staircase, and to learn how the ship proclaimed by the press to be “unsinkable” was so quickly taken by the sea are tantalizing thoughts indeed.
Eva’s parents were Benjamin Hart, a builder who had fallen on hard times, and his wife, Esther Bloomfield Hart. Eva had often told the story of how her father had made the monumental decision to try their luck in Canada in a single evening based on a lively visit from an old friend. The friend had come to see the Harts on his holiday, and he was brimming with enthusiasm for the many opportunities he had found in Winnipeg. The discussion was apparently music to the ears of Eva’s father.
Benjamin thought Esther would be delighted, because the new ship was said to be unsinkable, but instead, his wife was sick with worry, claiming to have great apprehension about their safety. Eva remembered her mother felt strongly that something very bad was going to happen in the night. She napped in the daytime, and every night she sat up in a chair, fully clothed and forced herself to stay awake.
On the night of the sinking, Eva was asleep in her bed when Titanic struck the iceberg. Her father wrapped her in a blanket and brought her up to the deck with her mother, and saw them into the heavily crowded lifeboat number 14.
When the Titanic sank a short while later, Eva, a tiny child, could not take her eyes off of the spectacle. With screams in the night as people hit the water and drowned, she watched as the ship broke apart, and then slipped into the sea. The sea was glassy smooth with only the stars casting eery illumination on the death scene. Chairs, debris and bodies floated about.
The body of Benjamin Hart was never recovered. Eva and her mother were taken aboard the rescue ship, the Carpathia, and continued on into New York with all of the survivors. They then returned to England and Esther remarried. Eva suffered from nightmares for years. She remained deeply attached to her mother and sought her out to calm her night terrors. She was 23 when Esther died and finally defeated her fears of ocean travel by taking a long voyage to Singapore and then Australia. Eva never married. She worked in many jobs over her life, which included a career as a professional singer in Australia. She later became, a Conservative party organizer and magistrate in England.
Long after streetcars no longer operated in Winnipeg, my grandmother, whom we called, Baba, still called buses streetcars, and bus tickets car fare. She was born in 1909, so she had always known public transportation in Winnipeg as the streetcar. I never really understood that until this week, when I stumbled across this 1953 film by Roman Kroiter, called 
I don’t know what the boys learned, but I seem to remember they also got roped into that Schottische business along with the girls. At least the boys could wear pants. The girls were required to wear skirts at that time, even in the coldest weather. So, to deal with this dress code in the days before snowsuits, we had to wear heavy snow pants over our tights and under our bulky winter coats. Our mothers were mostly in their twenties and early thirties then, and apparently lived in fear of whooping cough. From October to May, in addition to the coats and pants, our winter protection included hats with ear flaps, mittens on strings, and scarves wrapped double to cover our faces and protect us from the weather or perhaps germs.
Sandi Krawchenko Altner 
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